Friday, February 27, 2009

Hillary Clinton is off for her second trip abroad as U.S. Secretary of State and today during a special State Department press briefing, we got the low down on all her diplomatic stops. Hillary is set to take off tomorrow night.

First up, she will be participating in the Gaza donor conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt on Monday. She’ll also have the opportunity while in Sharm el-Sheikh to meet many of her Arab and European counterparts who will be gathered for the Sharm el-Sheikh conference. She also will have a bilateral meeting, of course, with Egyptian President Mubarak.

From Sharm el-Sheikh, she will travel on to Jerusalem and Ramallah. She’ll have a series of meetings with Israeli officials, both her counterparts now, as well as Prime Minister Olmert and President Peres, as well as have a chance for consultations with – Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been asked to form the next Israeli government. She’ll be in Jerusalem and Ramallah on Tuesday and partially on Wednesday to have meetings there with Palestinian officials.

She will be arriving in Brussels Wednesday and will have an informal dinner that night. The transatlantic dinner, which is an informal meeting which brings together the NATO, EU foreign ministers all together, plus the Swiss. The State Department says the dinner will be a good way to informally exchange views in a very relaxed atmosphere before the NATO ministerial meeting at NATO headquarters.

The next day, Thursday, is the NATO ministerial, her first as Secretary of State. She will also be meeting with EU officials, the so-called troika of Solana, Ferrero-Waldner, Czech Foreign Minister Schwarzenberg, and the Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt.

From Brussels, she will travel to Geneva, where she will have a bilateral meeting with Sergey Lavrov, and with the Swiss Foreign Minister Calmy-Rey on Friday.

Saturday, she will be meeting with Turkish officials in Ankara and with the president and prime minister as well as the foreign minister.

The State Department said that in terms of the substance, there are really three overarching theme to the trip to Brussels, which is the reconnection of the United States with Europe and really a sense of consolidating some of this enormous political goodwill on both sides of the Atlantic, harnessing it to a common agenda – not an American agenda, but a common transatlantic agenda.